


Tickets to the Operetta

by dancerinthedrink



Category: Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Genre: 1960s, Anal Sex, Crying, Depression, Enemies to Lovers, Fear, Hate Sex, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Internal Conflict, Internalized Homophobia, Kissing, M/M, Not Beta Read, Operas, Past Underage, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Racism, Post-Canon, Trauma, Twenty Years Later
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-24
Updated: 2019-06-24
Packaged: 2020-05-18 20:15:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19341823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dancerinthedrink/pseuds/dancerinthedrink
Summary: The island is with him always. In the grit of sand between each bite of food. In the waves that haunt his dreams. In the splash of scarlet on heady jungle leaves that is the same shade as his school colours. Then, one day, whilst taking refuge from a minor tempest in London's dreary avenues, he encounters a ghost from the past. Ghastly white and holding the keys to a past he is loath to revisit, Jack offers up a sign of peace. Ralph begrudgingly accepts.





	Tickets to the Operetta

It’s raining, but, of course, he should have expected that. In Australia, rain can be a godsend if not occasionally treacherous what with flooding from Eyre. Still, most of the time it’s a treat to behold and the girls love it, pushing past each other to get to the sports field for their after lunch break, exchanging conspiratorial grins while they sit dripping in maths class. England’s a different story. Rain here is as predictable as, well, the weather. Sun in the morning is cause for suspicion and paranoid clutching of umbrellas until the inevitable first dribble and a collective sigh of relief as the suspense comes to a close and the umbrellas pop open like daisies in the spring. It isn’t really a bothersome rain usually, a foggish mist that soothes Ralph with all the crispness of a ripe apple but today was a different story. Dashing down the lane, he turns his collar up though now it serves as a ramp for the drops to slither down his neck and wet his shirt. There had only been a light, tolerable drizzle when he left the flat this morning and in the time elapsed a veritable typhoon had broken out. Ralph ducks into a pub, a kindly older man holds the door for him and they exchange nods.

The rain off his coat starts to pool on the floor and the man behind the bar shoots Ralph a look of warning so Ralph sheds the soaking wooly mass and hangs it off a hook near the entrance, shivering in the chill of the pub. Everyone else is wearing their coats, lucky to already be in before the skies opened up. Ralph sneezes and what little murmuring there is stops instantly in an icy slit. Already heating up from embarrassment, he takes a seat at the bar and orders a glass of brandy to warm himself up. He balances the brown paper grocery bag awkwardly in his lap, full of soggy bread and cracked eggs sure enough. Mum won’t mind if he stays out a little longer to buy replacements, but she will worry for him in the storm. Handkerchief clasped in veiny hands. Ralph imagines she’ll be frozen in place til he comes home or else be mending some rip in fits and starts as any creak or knock could be Ralph coming through the door. His stomach knots and he sips his brandy down. 

She doesn’t deserve the worry, but he knows she takes whoever is nearest to fuss over, to mother. It was Ralph as a baby, then his father when Ralph left, then the sweet little misses upstairs, then Ralph again when he came back. He understands how much it hurts to love someone so helpless, especially when you have to leave them by themselves. It’s how he feels about his girls. A hearty pie will be waiting for him when he comes home, a hug too tight, and a kiss on the temple so soft and tender it’ll make he want to cry. He blinks hard. His cheeks stay dry. The man behind the bar raises his eyebrow at Ralph in quiet disbelief, and Ralph turns away in shame. He really wishes he was home now where he could cry into his mum’s arms or up in his room. 

The man who held the door for him is bent over a frothy pint in the back corner, watching the foam fizzle and slide down the rim of his mug. There are a few other men scattered around, some solitary, others in groups of two or three, mostly of middle-age. Ralph smiles to himself; he might be judging them for being into a pub in the middle of the day if he wasn’t there himself, besides, it _is_ tea time. But somewhere, in his heart of hearts, he does feel for them. They probably long for their wives and children as much as Ralph longs to be home before the radiator to read or be read to, or lay his head on his arms and discuss Mum’s latest failed attempt to follow Julia Child’s quiche recipe.

He turns back to the bar, resolved to finish his brandy and rush home as quick as possible whether the rains lessen or becomes stronger. It’ll be nice to sink into a hot bath and thaw his chilled body, then fall asleep until dessert. He gropes for his wallet until he remembers he left it in his coat, and he left all the money with the cashier at the grocery store. The barman is wiping down the perspiring wine bottle and, from the looks of it, is entirely engrossed with his task. Ralph doesn’t want to sneak out without paying. He really doesn’t. The thought makes him sick to his stomach, curdling the brandy, but trying to wheedle a pound off the other patrons fills him with an inexpressible dread that a night in jail or a punch by the barman is an infinitely preferable outcome.

It’s only a few pounds, but it’s a crime.

As he agonizes over his decision, God grants him an escape. An elegant pile of pounds and pence jingles against the counter in harmony with the voice that says, “A glass of warm water please.” It is barely an assisting distraction, for Ralph can hardly stifle a laugh. The barman gruffly gives some snark about drinking the rainwater and the strange man - ginger, as Ralph can see from out the corner of his eye - is smugly complacent.

“And not from the tap.” The barman stays still, big hand cradling a bottle. “ _Please_ ,” the man reiterates. He has all the entitlement of a prince for someone who’s asking for water of all things, yet there is an unmistakable thread of urgency. As Ralph gets a better look at the fellow, their eyes meet and a heavy black stone falls in Ralph’s stomach and turns into a black hole that slowly pulls him deeper and suffocates him. He ducks quickly, hunching over his glass, trying to fold himself in half, be discreet enough to be passed over as another drunk in the storm.

Blood crashes in his ears in great waves so loudly that he can’t hear the scrape of the barstool, the clop of Oxfords, the strained inhalation.

“Ralph?” Jack says.

He looks up and dammit if the floor doesn’t fall away. Jack is nothing like he remembers. The Jack that appears sporadically in his dreams, a crude spear in his hand, blood on his face, a war-cry rising in his throat, is still a haughty twelve-year-old boy who doesn’t understand why blood should stay within the confines of skin, why he can’t be the leader, why Ralph can’t bear to climb the rock. Could he even be the same person?

He’s handsome for one. No Errol Flynn, Hollywood-style beauty, rather he’s sleek and elegant like a well-bred greyhound. There are still a smattering of freckles over his cheeks that make him look younger than his thirty-two years (thirty-two? were they really that old now? sometimes a lifetime, sometimes yesterday), and his eyes, once a startling hue of periwinkle blue, have faded to a weak watery shade and are full of uncertainty. Clothed in black, he is the very picture of an undertaker. And his hair is still red. So very, very red.

“Hullo Merridew,” Ralph says around the lump in his throat, and Jack bursts into a smile so bright it might actually clear the rain.

“Oh, I knew it had to be you! I saw and I thought ‘No, it couldn’t be’ but then you turned away so quickly I was sure right then it was you!” Jack clambers on to the stool next to Ralph, his shoulders a mirror to the hunch of Ralph’s, yet, out of instinct, Ralph has the urge to tell him to sit up straight. “How’ve you been? _Where’ve_ you been? It has to be decades since we last seen each other. Since I’ve seen anyone really. I saw Sam out with his wife a year or so back and he’s got two babies now. Can you believe it? We’re all so old. You don’t look it though.” He’s so very eager to talk. Catching up like two ex-school chums would do if they met by accident years after graduation. It would break his heart if Ralph left. 

Without another word, he pushes off the barstool, hurriedly rushes to the door, no mind on the brandy now, and fidgets into his coat. He’s shaking so badly he can’t do up the buttons, they fly from his grasp and seem all too large for their buttonholes, but he can’t wait to breathe so he escapes the pub ready for the torrent of rain to soak him into a chill. Outside, he falls against the wall, gasping in empty rasps. The awning over the pub gives adequate protection but Ralph couldn’t care less if it was a piece of tissue paper in a typhoon, he’s just glad for the fresh air and the space. 

Jack follows as fast as his overcoat will allow. Ralph is ready, should the need arise, to plunge his fingers in Jack’s eyes and run. If he’s followed, he has the police this time, judges, court officials, other grown-ups to help him. God help him he wants to run. But for some unknown reason, he stays. Ralph tells himself he is too frightened to move. 

With all the rain on his face, Ralph can’t tell if Jack is crying. His voice sure comes out in blubbering heaves.

“Ralph, please,” he stutters. He has an umbrella Ralph didn’t notice before but it is folded and of no more use than of a walking stick. Jack prods the ground nervously with the tip. “Please Ralph. Can we talk? I want to talk with you.” He reaches out to Ralph who shrinks from his touch. He holds the point of his collar for a moment before it falls from his hand and Ralph feels the back of it grow taut against his neck. Jack tries again, this time capturing him.

The words, any words, _no, fuck off, I’m afraid I have to catch a cab_ , stay clogged down his throat and it’s all he can do to keep himself from collapsing into tears. The rain is a deafening clattering monstrosity or is it the blood in his ears again and he’ll bleed out. Before Ralph knows it, there’s a hand on his arm and he’s being drawn back into the pub. Jack’s expression is one of concern, sickening concern. Ralph gets unwrapped and placed in a corner chair like a naughty boy. Naughty for refusing to answer. His vision fizzes. Fuzzy blotches of black and grey expand until they pop and get replaced by new ones. The men in the pub turn sideways then they are on the ceiling. The chair he sits in has long legs and Ralph can’t reach the ground even if he points his toes. He feels light, like that time he and the music marm smoked a reefer cigarette together. The feeling is almost a pleasant one. It’s only when the clink of glasses on the table rings in his head that he is ripped back from floating into fear. Jack’s standing in front of his brandy glass and grocery bag, a dripping glass of slightly grey water is set apart. Ralph only vaguely recognizes the things and says the only thing that comes to mind: “Buy you a drink?”

Jack laughs, and Ralph thinks it is the worst sound he has ever heard. It is like the snapping of a chocolate bar, too sweet, too restrained, too civilized. The Jack he knew would howl like bear cub run through by a spear or else refuse to laugh at all. Smiles wear themselves strange on a face crimped for frowning. He collects his brandy, dropping his gaze to the soft glow of the drink. Jack saddles next to him, close enough that the cuffs of their coats drag together when they both go for the paper bag. 

“I’ll pay for yours and you can pay for mine. How does that sound?” He says.

“I was thinking more in the course of a real drink. A pint. I’ll get you a pint.” Ralph moves to stand but the floor is sticky and his chair doesn’t move when he pushes so instead the table is shoved far into Jack’s abdomen, letting out a metallic shriek. A sea of heads snap to attention and, in embarrassment, Ralph sinks down, bowing over the brandy. 

“I’d love that.” Ralph looks up in a flash, and Jack goes red. “I-I mean I really would like one, it’s only that I can’t. Water’s about the only thing I get nowadays, not even hot or cold though, just warm.” He sips from his sweating glass with an over exaggerated grimace. Ralph doesn’t hold it against him. It looks like was pissed out of a tap instead of a bottle.

“Sounds awful.” He won’t ask why, give Jack the chance to ramble. He can tell he wants to. His lips are quivering on the edge of a monologue, and he’s squirming in his seat. In school, on the island, Jack was never one to let a chance to talk go unheeded, here he seemed reluctant to. Ralph didn’t understand. Jack has done well for himself. He shouldn’t be frightened. Ralph should be the frightened one. And he is. Their shoes touch beneath the table. He jumps.

“It’s because if the water is too hot or too cold, it can make the vocal cords stiff. I’m a singer now.” His voice comes out high and thin. Ralph nods, shaking. “Not on the radio. In opera. Baritone. Really thought I’d make it to countertenor but I woke up one day when I was fifteen and try as I might couldn’t get above an A. Pity too; I always wanted to play Hamor.” He shrugs. He waits for a long second, watching Ralph drink, and Ralph feels like he’s being watched by a voyeur. Maybe he can get drunk before he leaves, but he doesn’t want to be in Jack’s debt. He won’t say anything though, and Jack seems to realize small talk won’t do to pry a word from him and is horrified. _They had a connection, didn’t they_ , Ralph can almost read his mind. Jack, with an almost stricken expression, softly says, “Where have you been? Really Ralph. I tried to find you.”

“Australia,” Ralph says as his skin crawls under the burn of a thousand eyes. “I got my teacher’s certificate and went to Australia when I was twenty-one. I work at a boarding school for black girls. I do the maths.” He can’t help but feel some pride when speaking. It was a bold move, everybody said so, that he emigrated so far away at such a young age, that he got a job at a prestigious school so fast, that he was good at his job and loved by the pupils and his colleagues alike. The warm Australian sun seems to be poking through the clouds, better than the brandy it warms him, a strong paternal hand on his back. It almost distracts him from Jack’s foot on his.

“It’s not the holidays.”

“I’m sorry?” 

“I mean, I don’t much about what they do in Australia but here nobody’s on holiday.” Jack shrinks as Ralph fixes him with a sharp glare. He starts to sputter. “But like I said, I don’t know anything really. I just assumed it would be the same. Sorry.” His face is beet-red. Taking a drink of water, Jack tries to covertly feel the heat pouring from his skin.

“You’re right. It isn’t. But I’m on holiday. To see my mum. She gets lonely.”

“Right. Stupid of me,” he says into his glass. It echoes. “Fun though innit? Working with kids. Got only prima donnas in the opera house. At least it’s not the West End.” 

“Probably makes less money than singing does. We’re all out in the desert basically. A storm like this one comes once in a blue moon. It is fun sometimes. They’re good girls.” For all the time he worked at the academy, Ralph had to live on campus, his salary made it so it was impossible to live anywhere else. He didn’t mind much but his stomach twisted in jealousy. Jack had done well for himself, clearly. A bit of grey fluff poked out around the collar of his coat, mink presumably.

“I’ll bet they make their own fun. We always did as children.” It disgusts him. It really does. How Jack thinks everything is hunky-dory. The brandy is burning at the back of his throat. He can see it in his eyes: the aqua shiver of the Pacific Ocean, fire, blood, adventure wet in sacrifice.

“I’m sorry Merridew, I have to go.” Ralph stands, snatches up his paper bag, quietly this time and the silence steadies him. “Mum will be wondering where I’ve gone off to. She needs her eggs.”

“Yes. Yes, of course. I won’t keep you. But Ralph?”

“What?” Ralph says irritably. The excuse was perfectly polite and reasonable. He should be on the way home now.

“Could we meet again? Here, if you like or somewhere different.”

“I don’t think that’s a very good idea.”

“Please? Just a chat?” He has his wrist again.

“Jack, no,” he scolds like he’s facing down one of the littler students. It works. Jack steps back, breathing hard.

“Tonight. I have a performance. Can you make it?”

“Jack…”

“I’ll leave two tickets at the box office under my name for the eight o’clock show. Bring your mum if you want. We can meet after.” His hands don’t know what to do with themselves. His eyes worm their way too far past Ralph’s defenses. They see without knowing. They see the past like it is a movie scrolling over a hundred foot screen, every detail magnified and illuminated in the pitch, objective, in the cold calculating way Ralph taught maths, in the way it presents an anthropology lesson on the folly of stupid little boys who couldn’t get along even when it meant death. Ralph sees it too, and he wishes to be blind, wishes he wasn’t so captivated by the images that would horrify any kind soul.

“Maybe,” he says. “I’ll think about it.” Then he is out in the rain. 

It is a baptism, refreshing. The subway cars will be packed to bursting, permeated with toe-curling odors and disgruntled passengers while the cabs are occupied with zooming through every puddle with the promise of a tip stinging the backs of the drivers’ necks, so Ralph walks home, his legs heavy in the slop of the mud and his fingers numbing on the bag. A zing of pride shoots through him. Jack will probably be stuck in the pub until the rain stops, maybe missing his performance in the process and will go home to a cold, empty flat, pink slip already dancing in the mail slot or if he decides to chance the rain, will get horrendously ill, making a fool of himself on stage by way of too loud sniffles and shattered notes while Ralph, toughened by years in the harsh Australian climate, will be greeted by a piping hot meal, up in bed by the reasonable hour of eight o’clock. He is gasping for air by the time he arrives at his mother’s townhouse. The upstairs neighbor arrives at the same time as he does with the foresight to have brought an umbrella on her excursion and is kind enough to walk him to the landing and open up the door his frozen fingers can’t manage.

Mum is watching television, pretending she wasn’t looking through the rain-blurred window, but Ralph sees the awkward way she wrenches her head from the door to the telly, then back again with a fabricated expression of surprise. Leaping from the couch, her mouth is open in a perfect red oval, like the grades he would give out to the girls who, no matter how hard they tried, couldn’t understand the class. He cringes at her touch, she’ll come away with big wet stains on her nice mauve suit set, but his shoulders do slouch from where they were up at his ears, the tension in them hurting all the more.

“Ralph,” she says, moving back, inspecting, “Are you quite alright? You look as if someone’s hit you straight in the face with a frying pan. It has to be all that ice-cold rain. Next time, my love, I expect you to bring an umbrella with you whenever you go out. You aren’t in Australia anymore, and we don’t want you catching cold, sniffle all the while you’re on your flight home.” Optimistic, always optimistic. He’d never get back to Australia, and she knew it too. There were cracks in her cheery demeanor, you could see it in the little bleach stain on the inside of her collar, caused by an absent-minded application, the way her smile drooped at one corner when she looked you in the eye, the nervous habit of tugging on her earlobe in Morse Code, three short, three long, three short, a shorthand for escape, used at parties back when she and Dad went out on the town nearly every night.

“I’m fine, Mum,” Ralph says. He brushes her arms away and heads into the kitchen, a small room, but the countertops are crammed full of mixing bowls and flour handprints. The kitchen table too, small as it is, is crowded by a cookbook and streaked with gooey egg whites. As he takes in the mess, the burnt smell of eggs violently assaults him, a sour bit of vomit rising in the back of his throat, and he slaps his hand over his mouth, stumbling backwards onto the settee. “Blimey,” he cries. 

Bustling past, Mum has already got her apron on. “Oh, deary me. I must’ve left the quiche too long. It was to be so lovely, you see.” She opens the oven and a huge plume of smoke spills out. With her big embroidered apron, formerly white, she fans the black mass. “Darling, crack a window won’t you or else we’ll both be smothered with soot. The police will think us Negros with all this black on our faces.” She sounds sincere, and Ralph can’t help but roll his eyes as he pushes up from the settee.

“They wouldn’t, Mum.”

“Yes, they would. Harriet Parker told me just the other day of a family that died in a fire was so burnt up they were buried in closed caskets by the wrong family. You see, it was a double flat this white family was sharing with a Negro family, and when the police found the bodies they were all black, and the police got the Negro relations to identify them. Only it was the white family that had died while the Negroes were up in Leeds visiting Granny.”

“That sounds like a fake story, Mum. Something they make up to get whites and blacks to stop cohabitating. Don’t listen to what Mrs Parker tells you about what she’s heard on the news, you watch it yourself or tell her to stuff it.” A fresh rush of shivers rocket through him as he shoves open the kitchen side door, ushering out the smoke like it’s a line of girls at recess.

With her hands ensconced in oven mitts, Mum pulls the glowing tin from the oven and drops it on the stovetop, a resounding clatter echoes and Mum swears under her breath. “Such language on you! You know I don’t like to watch the news; I’d read the paper but my reading glasses went missing some five years ago and I still haven’t found them.” 

“I’ll buy you a new pair, then.”

“No, no. Don’t you worry about me.” She brandishes a large knife, brings it down into the black mound erupting out of the tin. The steamy aroma of cooked ham floats by Ralph and out into the rain. An experimental poke confirms suspicions. “Right as rain,” Mum proudly proclaims, fists on hips, a sheen of sweat glistening on her brow. “Just needs a decrusting then it’ll be a nice supper for tonight.” Then, a snap, “Now close that door before we both catch a cold. You put away my bread and eggs, and I’ll run a nice hot bath for you.”

He groans. “You don’t have to Mum.”

“I may not have to but I’m going to.” Before he can stop her, she troops out of the kitchen and up the stairs, a hushed gushing soon following. Sighing, Ralph unloads the groceries, chucks the bag into the bin, and they are relatively unharmed, no cracks on the eggs and only a corner of the loaf is wet. He falls into a chair, legs shaking, fatigue wringing him dry. The inside of his mouth is tacky. Not having drunk anything since the brandy, he requires water. The rain is a roar. When the call comes from upstairs it is a distant echo somewhere far from the cognizant part of his brain. He goes lightheaded for the second time today as he feels himself rise, move, and rise again until he is in his bedroom, the squelching sound of his feet silenced and his shoes and socks in pile. Instructions to get undressed are obeyed. 

He hisses at the heat and the door closes. He gets out of the bath and locks it, then the warmth is welcomed. 

His skin is clammy, it’ll get pruned. Pops are muffled by the bathwater as he cracks his knuckles, his wrists, his ankles, sinking underneath the surface where it is quiet, and he can breathe again.

Water is familiar, like the embrace of an old friend. When he had first gotten to Australia, before he felt like part of the staff at school, he would go to the coast, descend below the waves and wait until his head was on the precipice of explosion, hatch from the salt only to be knocked back by a wave of tsunamic proportions, swirling amongst the disturbed sand until he was so afraid he promised himself he would never do it again. Eventually, he kept that promise.

Being in the midst of water is a lot different than being surrounded by fire.

First of all, it’s controlled. You decide exactly how long you spend under and which parts get submerged. Unless there’s a hand on your face or your chest pushing you to the bottom, you’re more or less safe. Even in folklore, there are no creatures that live in fire while there were mermaids and selkies and the five different kinds of water nymphs in Grecian myths. Water, even salt water, is nurturing, second of all. The dolphins that squeak, bashing their tails in the breach, the whales that rise for air, the deadly jellyfish bobbing along coral and seaweed couldn’t live if it weren’t for water. It’s a haven from fire. It can even defeat fire if there’s enough of it. 

But they can be the same in a lot of ways, too.

You pass through them, though it takes a lot of strain. They both burn your lungs if you stay surrounded by them for too long. Water may save lives, but it can kill easily. A girl, called Alice, went to Sydney with her family to visit more family and drowned. Her classmates wept for days, and Ralph had wondered if it was his fault. He still does.

And fire has its good points, now he thinks of it. Cooking. Warmth. As a weapon. But that isn’t a good thing.

He comes out of the water, sucking large breaths through his nose, and it hurts. That a small space needs to take in so much. He won’t open his mouth. He’ll scream if he does.

He thinks of Jack. He doesn’t want to, but it’s either Jack or work and he’s thought about work for long enough, so long in fact that his head gets so heavy it slams him to the ground and knocks him out when he does. 

So he thinks of Jack.

Jack on the island, at the beginning, haughty and sweat pouring off him, at the middle, grinning and spotted like a leopard, at the end, wet with sweat and tears and horrified behind berry juice war paint, his eyes glittering in the fire. Jack at the pub, manicured and trimmed and still freckled but full of fits and starts. He thought him handsome. He thought of Young Jack, at the least, at the beginning, as cute as he thought of all children who played at being grown-up with such small victories as what notes he could sing. When he was young he would have thought Old Jack to be a ponce, not at all like his father, staunch in his starched Navy uniform, every bit of Mum’s hard work in the sharp pressed collar points. He wouldn’t have thought Young Jack as handsome when he was young, which is why he wouldn’t have understood the strange feeling pooling in his stomach whenever they spoke or exchanged a smile across the circle of boys.

Jack was so cute as a little boy, though nothing that Ralph would want as a son. He wouldn’t want himself as a son, come to think of it. He is too much a product of his mother, and when Ralph dreams of having a child, he doesn’t dream of it having a mother. He’s never dreamed of having a wife. He had girlfriends, one he shared a flat with for two years, but never once did he want to marry her. The baby he wanted would be brought by the stork, left on his doorstep like a Dickensian protagonist in the first chapter, to be raised by the good and kind man of modest means until he grew up to be a great man in his own right and discovered he was the long lost son of some wealthy duke and inherited the lifestyle he was deserving of. 

In the end, he’s happy he doesn’t have a kid. Mum would coo over him. Ralph would have no way of telling him why they had to leave Australia. Maybe it’s better he left nothing behind. No, it is definitely better. 

What did he know about raising a child? He couldn’t have born sending the tyke off to school around other boys. If he wasn’t fast enough or clever enough or personable enough, he’d be eaten alive. 

But Ralph would have been a good father nonetheless. Plenty of practice he had. With the girls, with the littluns, with himself. _Don’t forget to brush your teeth today, it doesn’t matter if you have nowhere to go, you’re taking a walk, put more vegetables in that stew, you still have to make your bed even when nobody’s going to see it._ He took care of himself, well as Mum was doing now, like a mum more than a father.

Ralph grabs Mum’s bottle of lavender scented shampoo off the side of the bathtub and rubs a generous squirt in his hair, white with a tinge of purple. The delicately illustrated lengths of flower on the bottle make him squirm with a longing for a home he can’t place. Until he can.

A holiday with Mum and his father to Greece. His Auntie Clotilde and Uncle Jimmy were there too with their three girls. Cousins Abby, Lauren, and Mick as well. Granny, before she died two years later. Lavender was everywhere around the rented villa like grass, brambling in the breeze. In the years before the war, his life was so peaceful despite the occasional hushed chatter about Germany by the grown-ups in the hours long after twilight. Everyone had been smiling and happy then.

His father was attentive, not frightened at all even though his name was on the draft. He was a good father. Very very good.

They played at house together, as Mummy and Daddy to the littluns, he and Jack. Ralph was Mummy only because Jack was the one who wanted to go out and do the hunting and Ralph stayed organizing the berries and filling up the coconut shells with water and building shelters. Sharing shelters, the pearlescent sand like a mattress, Jack would crawl the one he shared with several littluns - after the brouhaha with the beast, they liked to sleep in one big dog-pile - and coax him out into the forest, the moon and stars clear without city lights for competition. 

Next to the signal fire they would reach into each other's shorts and touch each other in the way they were later taught was shameful. They didn’t feel guilty then. Just hot. The bath is steaming. Lavender smell is thick.

Ralph needs to be clean. And isn’t water the perfect conduit for that? Holding your hands under a scalding faucet, scrubbing until the bar of soap in whittled to a barely graspable speck, and the sores of last week’s (yesterday, this morning) session burst in rivulets of pus and blood, like a woman possessed. A woman, a queen, like he heard while strutting past Miss Novak’s classroom, her cosmopolitan Krakow accent reciting Shakespeare’s sleepwalking scene, the monologue of madness, out damn(ed?) spot, the perfumes of Arabia and all that. Maybe it didn’t work for old wifey but the thick sterile odor of soap was civilization to Ralph, being clean is what the civilized were. 

Novak, called Malgorzata by her parents, anglicized Mallory, was smart and told a mean pun for a bilingual and told an eyebrow crinkling pun for a cruel bilingual. And she was pretty: Slavic nose, suntanned, pure black hair in a neat plait that ended just above her shoulder blades. Ralph meant to ask her out for seafood sometime but after the Scottish play incident, he kept their interactions strictly professional. No more wordplay over milky tea, unfortunately. But she was very pretty.

And wasn’t Jack handsome now? So very much so. Good thing he was a singer because his words were trembling and tripping things; he couldn’t be called charming, never was really. Boisterous, loud, pushy. Though he had whispered then, sounded convincing, like it was the right thing to do. They were going to be there for a long time, might as well get used to it, get closer, get off.

It was only when he turned fifteen, when the physical education teacher spoke to them about self-pollution and queers, and patrols roamed the halls with torches, flashing them at the wriggling mounds of blankets, that he learned shame. And what a valuable lesson it was, to know what to keep to himself, to know what was wrong; sometimes they were separate or they overlapped and the lesson was useless, but that was only sometimes.

He had a friend like Jack in Fifth Form, not like him in temperament or even really looks, but they would sneak off together, to the roof, the grove at the edge of the rugby pitch, the showers at the witching hour, until the lesson when his friend got redder and redder until Ralph thought his head might explode in a burst of blood, so when he went to him that night, his friend knocked him away and spit “filthy queer” at him even though Ralph wasn’t a queer. He only did stuff with boys because there were no girls around. When there were girls around, he kissed their waxy mouths and poked at the mushy bits under their skirts until they finally let him use his prick instead of his fingers.

He had never heard Jack sing, not even at school, but then again, he can’t really remember school before the island. What had the opera been? He had shouted it out after him. _Werther_. Sounded German; how did they manage to get away with that?

Some years ago, a girlfriend made Ralph take her to the opera, _Carmen_. It had been an exuberant affair, full-breasted women belting their very souls out, chorus girls in dresses that stuck out perpendicular when they spun, and the leading man bent over a bloody stage, beautifully sorrow. The girlfriend had liked it a lot. Mum might too. He hopes Jack has a small role. He hopes he won’t look handsome like Jose did in _Carmen_ , chest exposed as much as some of the women, glossy ropes of sweat falling down his billowing white shirt, gritted teeth, black eyebrows, a rich dangerous song coming from his lips. He hopes he won’t slip coming out of the bath, especially if he keeps splashing water on the floor. His hand starts to cramp.

The bath water has gone cold.

He’s dizzy while he drains the bath; nausea was always said to be a common side effect of self-abuse. The towel rack rings as he steals a terry cloth length from it. He doesn’t remember putting out his robe, but it is laid on his bed, wide-armed, welcoming.

“Mum?” he shouts down from his bedroom, toweling off his hair. “Mum!”

“What?” she shouts back. “Did you say something?” There’s a shrill drone under her voice then a nattering choir of laughter. The telly was on.

_And welcome to the stage Ellie Idele! Let’s give her a big round of applause everybody! Tell us, little lady, what is it you do?_

“No! Do you want to go to the opera?” The bath must have sapped whatever energy the freezing rain had shocked into him; he can barely muster the strength to raise his voice.

_Well, Roger, I sing. She sings! How about that folks. What are you going to sing for us tonight?_

“What?”

_It’s a song my mother would sing to me every night before I went to bed when my father was out fighting in the war._

“I said: do you want to go to the opera! I have tickets for eight!” He enunciates each word carefully. They tear their way out of his throat, so loud. His mouth is too close to his ear. God made him the wrong way. His heart is where his brain should be, beating like a war drum.

_Somewhere over the rainbow, way up high..._

“Speak up, I can’t hear you!”

_There’s a place that I heard of once, in a lullaby..._

“I said-” Ralph sighs and pulls on his robe, troops halfway down the stairs, stumbling more like it, and leans over the banister, his head spinning, he might fall and crack his head open. The telly seems quieter now. “I have tickets for the opera. Would you want to go?”

“Oh, yes. That sounds lovely.” Her smile from the sofa is the extra push keeping him from collapsing on the stairs, an electric jolt that has him dancing all the way to his bed. He plans to have a short lie down. Five minutes tops. But as soon as his head sinks into the pillows, he is fast asleep.

_Where troubles melt like lemon drops...above the chimney tops...that’s where you’ll find me._

* * *  
He dreams of the boat. Not the one they were rescued by, he can’t remember much after the soldiers started to line them up and file them into the hull. But the one that carried them back to England he remembers. All the boys got buttered toast and hot tea and fresh pyjamas and their own bunk.

It was just his luck Jack found him in the night.

Tea warm in his belly and butter on the back of his throat, the lull swaying of sailing drove Ralph into a clutched slumber where he was, for the most part, happy.

A dry palm over his mouth rocked him into consciousness and he started praying from God to grant him invisibility when Jack materialized from out of the dim in front of his eyes. Fear of Germans subsided for the moment, Ralph panted as Jack lay next to him, gathering the blanket over his shivering body. After their weeks on the island they had both gone lanky and muscular and Ralph felt Jack’s bicep against his elbow when he settled back down.

“What d'ya think happens next?” He whispered up against Ralph’s ear. Ralph shrugged. 

Their eyes met and all the iris was black. He turns his back to him. Hot breath pours onto his neck like the fireplace at Christmastime.

“Well, whatever does...it’ll be okay. I promise you Ralph. You’re gonna be okay.”

* * *

He wakes up just before seven; he sees the hand sweep to the number as he cracks his eyes open, and they feel like runny egg yolks. The pillowcase made red wrinkles on the left side of his face that hurt when he peels himself up. 

The best clothes, worthy of being worn to the opera, at the bottom of his suitcase, are wrinkled as well, black more brown and white more grey, mildewed with misuse. There are other suits he can wear, that he would wear if he were going alone, but Mum had probably spent the whole time he was asleep sorting through her closet. She had loads of good dresses. 

The clothes he chooses are nice, clean at least, matching, a full suit set instead of a tacky bit of slacks and sport coat. He knows how to dress snappy when he means to. 

The only noises are the vinyl zippering of him sliding on his trousers and jacket, the anguished yawn that tears through him unexpectedly, and the underbreath swears as he fumbles for his Oxfords so he assumes the rain has stopped. That’s good. Mum likes to walk and Ralph hates taxis. 

Lopsidedly, he troops downstairs, the mist of drowsiness like a hangover condensing his brain into a floppy ball of lead. Humidity rises up to meet him. Its origin: the kitchen. This afternoon’s eggy concoction is being kept warm in the oven while a half-eaten square sits on a plate in front of Mum, jiggly-white and missing its burnt crust but still abandoned as Mum squints at a newspaper barely inches from her nose. Its rustles when she looks behind herself, gives him a smile.

“Finish mine off, love. I know I won’t.” She gestures at her plate. Even though Ralph has no allegiance to quiches, he falls upon it ravenously, shoveling the gelatinous mass down in a way he would have reprimand a student for. Mum doesn’t mind in the slightest, contented smile hidden by the Arts section. “Take your time, we’ve gotten a whole forty minutes until curtain up.”

“I don’t want you to have to miss the first act if we can help it,” he says through the quiche. “Don’t want you to not get the plot.”

“You are such a silly duck sometimes, my dear. Everyone knows the story isn’t the important part of an opera, what with the libretto being all stretched out by the singing. It’s all about the music and the voices and the costumes. Unless you speak French or Italian you wouldn’t even be able to understand the best of them. You know, your father and I would pay for tickets for one show then sneak into the second and third acts for other shows and piece together a wild storyline with all our disparate pieces, but I won’t subject you to that tonight.” She reaches across the table and pats his hand. The touch is firm yet hesitant, pulling away ever so slightly whenever their skin stops touching. Ralph can’t blame her, he wouldn’t want to touch him either. His stomach churns. The fork clacks dully on the table.

“I’m ready to go,” he says. The newspaper is folded.

“Are you sure? You haven’t finished your quiche.” She peers at the plate suspiciously. 

“What about you? You only ate a bit of it,” he retorts.

“I had a big lunch.” 

“Fine. Are you ready to go?”

She smoothes down her skirt as she stands, a tasteful collared dress the color of thunder. “I’ve left my opera glasses in my bedroom. Shouldn’t take more than a second.”

“I’ll get it.” Ralph shoots up and the utensils bounce several inches into the air, a cacophony and a cringe when they return to their places. “Don’t trouble yourself. Get your purse and wait for me by the door.” Leaving her open-mouthed, he sprints up the stairs and snatches the rhinestoned binoculars from off her vanity. The exercise leaves his stomach more turbulent than ever, and he expels the barely digested quiche into the toilet bowl, the blood vessels in his face pushed to the limited as he forces every last liquidated crumb from his body. The bathroom cabinet is home to a legion of breath mints, five of their ranks are promptly consumed by Ralph.

The opera glasses fit perfectly into Mum’s little hand as he curls her hand around the stem with a kiss on her cheek for good measure.

Walking by Mum’s side has always been a pleasant affair ever since he first learned to walk and they would go to Kensington Gardens to see Peter Pan and the other children who had clumsy puppies they were teaching to fetch, their hands in each others’ until he had gotten old enough to be embarrassed by his mother simply being within a certain distance of him. Or, at least, that’s what Mum thought of it. Ralph hadn’t minded holding her hand when he was twelve and would have happily gone along with it until he turned eighteen, but he came back from the island and had dirty hands that Mum shouldn’t have to suffer to touch. 

They lived in the heart of the city, got the townhouse cheap because an old couple had died there, Mum would joke it was romantic, so the walk to the theater was untroubled by a strenuous path. Ralph would have insisted on a taxicab if Mum had put on high heels. The walk helps to settle his stomach, though a glass of whisky might have had a better chance at that. The gentle plodding alongside and past strangers shabby and glitzy. He sees a young couple, grinning and giddy, gussied to the nines hurry into a carriage, the door closing on the girl’s shiny silver skirt.

The opera house is impossible to miss. A grand monstrosity of Greco-inspired architecture, colonnade high enough that Ralph squints at the setting sun when he tries to look at the top, that, despite the infinitesimal cracks, could hold itself together against the arias and duets.

At the box office, surrounded by excited chattering opera-goers, Ralph thinks he might faint, the venom of Jack’s name (“Two under Merridew”) makes him sick, but Mum is impressed.

They find their seats on the first balcony right at the front - Jack spared no expense for them - around the red velvet and gold edging, around the RP muttering. Ralph gets vertigo looking up at the proscenium and, in a vulgar gesture, tucks his head between his knees, breathing hard at the solid ground a foot from the tip of his nose. He nearly falls asleep if it wasn’t for the cacophony of applause that erupts as the lights dim and the orchestra blares the first notes of the score. 

Ralph enjoys the minutes of the opera that are exposition, the children galavanting around the stage, even from his distance he can see the anxious joy in their shaking, bouncing steps, in their satisfied smiles that peep out whenever they hit a perfect ninety degree turn; he likes the way the lead, Charlotte, swishes her skirt a touch overdramatically so it has to be the actress adoring the costume rather than the director’s choice. The set, too, is great. The pendulum in the grandfather clock doesn’t swing, everything is made of wood and steel unlike the cardboard walls constructed for school plays. He thinks he might actually like opera.

The children are having so much fun. They don’t even flinch when the father character sweeps them up in a bear hug or Charlotte tilts their chins up for a kiss on the temple. He almost forgets to be afraid.

It’s a while after Jack walks on stage that Ralph recognizes him; he almost think his twisted fantasy came true and Jack, rednosed, is sitting miserably backstage, nursing a cup of tea, sneezing every so often. Mum, wanting to rest her eyes for a second, passes her opera glasses to him. Charlotte is in his arms and he is singing right into her face. He wears a black wig and his freckles are painted out with a peachy sort of foundation, giving him a healthy complexion. He feels guilty. He didn’t read the program and had started to like the character he was playing, sympathized with him. Jack casts a long shuddering note to the balcony.

Breath, noxious, catches in his lungs and they, in a theater of hundreds, are alone. Or, at least, Ralph is alone with Jack, lamb caged with a lion, naked to the possibility of being spotted, singled out, everyone else’s eyes falling on him and somehow knowing and hating.

He wants to be absorbed in the red velvet seat cushion; he wants to be baking in Australia; he wants a small warm girl on his knee, under his chin; he wants to have stayed beneath the bathwater for five agonizing minutes until his lungs ran empty of air. Most of all, he wants a do-over, a razor-sharp seashell cloaked by his palm and the flicker of salvation at his back, the glowing ooze of blood on his hands, the heat between his legs shuddering back to longing. Jack tucks a curl behind Charlotte’s ear, fallen on accident, knocked loose by a breathless twirl. Ralph crosses his legs and his arms.

Warmth permeates his performance with no good reason. Charlotte holds his hand like it is made of gold and he stares back at her with genuine affection. Affection cut so deep Ralph wishes the story was about their happy marriage. 

The dark warble of his baritone is captivating. Out of the corner of his eye, Ralph senses Mum turn her head to follow him across the stage. He lives there. There is no backstage or orchestra; he communicates by song; he feels the tensile emotions pulling their way out of his larynx like the neverending rainbow handkerchief of a clown, endlessly colorful and bright and fluid; he pains at Charlotte’s love for Werther; his heart shatters louder than the gunshot that eventually takes Werther from the stage. The anticipation when he leaves the stage grabs the audience around the throat and the disappointment is palpable when he never again returns in character.

He’s professional, Ralph thinks.

He never searches the audience, stays in character and bows neatly when the curtain falls for the final time. Out of spite, Ralph stops clapping for him and keeps to his seat even when Mum rises, biting back a whistle. 

He wants to leave, be back home quick as the devil, but, by some stroke of bad luck, Miss Parker, the daughter of racist next-door neighbor git, is in the lobby with a beau, sturdy chap, square-shaped, and equally as put off by the idea of standing around for twenty minutes, a yawn already pooling at his round chin. 

_Alright mate_ , they say to each other telepathically, with a nod. They don’t keep each other's eye after that, the beau mostly stares wistfully at Parker. For good reason: she’s a real looker. If Ralph was talking to any other bloke but hers they could bond over that. Parker sees the bloke seeing her and a crinkle of annoyance rises on her forehead. She jerks her head towards Ralph, turning back to Mum, smile fresh.

“Like the show?” Ralph asks. He doesn’t really care but he’ll grip to whatever common ground they have. The bloke shrugs.

“Dunno. The singing was pretty good, I’ll guess. Didn’t get a wit of the plot though. Daisy-” he brandishes his thumb at Parker- “thought it was crackers. Her palms were red as cherries by the time we left. She cried a bit too.”

“So did Mum. Clapped I mean. She never cries, not even at the cinema.” Mum got this weird rush for drama: the screams, the infidelities, the terrors of life, whether gritty kitchen-sink stuff or cast over with a rosy curtain or two-dimensional horror stories tacked across the morning paper. Ralph’s father like politics; Mum like political scandal. Always, she came out a theater beaming. If there were tears, they were shook free by excitement. She was just about crackling with electricity when Werther pulled the trigger.

“Daisy’s real crybaby. I stepped on a ladybird at lunch - accidentally I might add - and she was blubbering til tea.” He covered his mouth, hiding a little smile. “Don’t really mind it much, though. Gonna make it hard to talk with her about it.” Ralph looks over at the women: Mum’s offering Daisy a hankie and she accepts with a self-deprecating shudder, mopping up her leaking eyes. There’s no reason for it but a jade thread of envy slithers in a zig-zag down his heart. “What’d you think?”

“Hm? Good.” He nods non-committedly. 

“Anything in particular you liked?” An edge to the bloke’s voice causes Parker’s head to whip in their direction, a flash of white in her mouth - a snarl or a smile, they both can’t tell; how she managed to pick up the subtle bite from the distance and the noise between them, they don’t know either. The bloke hunches and Ralph can feel the waves of loathing rolling off him in sheets, he was the kind one, volunteering information, and gets his head bitten off for expecting the same in return. He racks his brain for something intelligent.

“Charlotte was really good,” Ralph ventures. “I thought for a singer she was a really good actress. And Werther and her were good together.” An old woman, wearing a dress cut much too low in the neckline for someone her age, passes them, wrinkles her nose at such a plebian review. Her back is turned by the time the bloke has got his hand out of his pocket to give her the forks, biting his upper lip intently; he looks like a mule. 

Unable to stop himself, Ralph bursts out laughing; he’s bent in half when the bloke joins in and they recover enough to dash worried looks over at their women, like a pair of schoolboys peeking in the ladies’ anatomy section in the health textbook.

“Mangy old bird,” the bloke mutters, returning his hand. He perks up, inquisitive. “Was Werther the fellow in the grey or the blue? The one that the bird was singing with in the church?”

Wiping a tear from his cheek, Ralph shakes his head. “No, that was Albert. Albert and Charlotte are married because that’s what her mother’s dying wish was but Charlotte and Werther are in love and when they can’t be together he kills himself.”

The bloke falls back on his heels. “How is it you know all that? The names and all. I didn’t get none of that and I thought I was paying pretty close attention.”

“It’s-” Ralph whips open the program, a flutter of paper blows his hair up an inch- “the synopsis. They got it written down before the biographies. I read the whole thing cover to cover because we got here so early.”

Eyes lit up, the bloke takes the program without malice, scanning the neatly typed paragraphs gleefully. “Crack-on mate! And here I thought I was thick as shit. No wonder Daisy could barely keep her hands off the thing.” At the sound of her name, Daisy shoots her beau another ambiguous expression but he waves the program at her in indelible cheer and she collapses into a grin so wide her eyes all but disappear above her mounding cheeks.

They lean over the program together as Ralph recaps the individual scenes and the bloke grunts in happy recognition, occasionally pausing to yodel out a sentence of nonsense operatic French, gestures and all, making Ralph grip to his shoulder to keep upright. He’d invite him out for a drink sometime as long as Parker’s good with it.

When his name is called he thinks it could be a trick. A weird half-remembrance brought on by the atmosphere of male camaraderie. 

Regardless, he looks up. 

Jumpy as a rabbit, Jack was standing in the swarm of his ex-audience, invisible to them out of costume. The crust of his cream-colored foundation stains at his hairline, the rest of his face flush by applause. He beckons Ralph with a cock of his head. 

He’s wearing a dinner jacket, pressed, sheen reflecting off the lapels like water in the sunshine, a far cry from the homey wool of Albert. He stands in the midst of the crowd and Ralph tries to keep up the pace with Parker’s bloke but his voice has a strangled quality as his Adam’s apple palpates. Jack’s stare takes something out of him, the size and shape of safety.

However, it’s only when Jack starts walking towards him does Ralph feel naked again. Alone again. No one can protect him or stop _him_ because there is no one. Before, he could tear through the house, slipping between patrons like a serpent then leg it to the London Airport, be anywhere else in an hour depending on how long he was able to ignore the smarting of his feet. 

“Ralph,” he says and Ralph doesn’t hear him. Not really he doesn’t. He sees his mouth move but the sound is squeaky, crackling in the adolescent manner. He opens and closes his mouth like a dying fish.

The bloke, finally looking up from the program, sticks his hand out automatically. “Michael Ulton. Mickey for short.” Jack regards the hand like it is a curiosity from the Orient before shaking it silently. He wants Ralph to introduce him.

“Mick,” Ralph says like they’re old friends, “this is Jack Merridew.” Jack’s face, which was never sunny to begin with, falls into shadow as Mickey screws his up in thought.

“You’re not...You are! Damn John Merridew! You were cracking tonight! Albert, you played right? My gal’s going to love this. Oi Daise!” Mickey jerks Jack’s arm up and down like the arm of a water pump and he’ll dislodge a stream of fresh insights from the rust of Jack's mouth. “Real great voice you got there.” At Ralph: “You didn’t tell me you knew ‘im? Shame, shame. Daisy blossom!” Parker troops to his side dutifully, Mum in tow. 

“Can’t you keep it down for just a minute? You’re always jabbering to your footie mates when we meet them on dates; I want to talk to my friends too,” Parker says, shying away from Mickey’s swinging an arm around her shoulder but he gets her in the end, holds her to his chest.

“Not now, love. This bloke played Albert.” As Parker cocks her head, evaluating Jack, Ralph thinks he can make a break for it. Mum snaps her head to him when he grabs her arm, shooing him away without a second thought. 

“Oh deary me, he did, didn’t he?” A rosy blush rises on her cheeks. “You were ever so lovely. I’d sell my mother to sing like you.” Jack, in a show of false modesty, ducks his head, makes excuses about practice and colleagues, but Ralph can tell he loves it. 

“You two know each other?” Mum cuts through the flattery curtly and Jack’s hand freezes where it was sheepishly rubbing the back of his neck. He shoots a nervous glance at Ralph, waiting for his lead.

“We went to school together.” Ralph is short and shall remain as such. He doesn't owe anyone an in-depth explanation but he won’t let Jack define their past. “We only met again this afternoon.”

Mickey breaks from Parker to toss his other arm over Ralph and muss his hair with a harsh fist but his hold is gentle. “Makes sense. If you had an in at the opera house for long and didn’t let your Mum in on it, you’d be a right bastard. Wouldn’t he be Daise?” They rock back and forth. 

Two pats fall on Ralph’s back. _You good mate?_

He squeezes back on a suited elbow. _I’ll be fine._ A quick look is exchanged for confirmation then Mickey slides back to his girlfriend.

“I wish you used cleaner language, Mick,” she says, settling into his armpit. Despite being a tad starstruck, Mum is suspicious of this stranger in front of her that can barely tear his gaze from her son to anyone else. 

It hurts to be this close to Jack. To be watched like an exhibit, some crumbling mummy at Natural History.

“Thank you for the tickets. It was very kind of you.” Her calling card, her broad chin, is stuck out like a challenge, a rhinoceros letting him horn flash in the sun, blinding a prowling cat. 

“It was the least I could do.” Mum looks at Jack; Parker and Mickey look at each other. Jack looks at Ralph.

Ralph looks at the floor. 

There’s a sparkle on the carpet that could be a diamond but is more likely a dislodged sequin. 

Somebody clears their throat.

“Ralph, can we get a drink?” The words are toneless. They could have been spoken by anyone and, for a moment of stupidity, he thinks it might be Mickey.

“I’m not sure,” Mum says. “It is pretty late.”

“Oh, it’s barely eleven Margie. Let the boys have their drinks and we’ll grab a late croissant. There’s the most tops cafe thing I wanted to take you to. My mother won’t go, says there are too many Asians.” Parker takes Mum by the wrist, ready to whisk her away to a dinky table of gossip and hot tea. “Mick, come on.” 

Mickey hangs back, unfazed by the flounce of the skirts. “You said ‘boys’. Thought that included me.”

“Of course not. What would I do without you?” Ralph can nearly hear his resolve start to crumble, his would too, under the weight of Parker’s indelible grin. He makes to follow but not without a final glance to Ralph. 

Once the trio is gone and they are alone together, Ralph feels calm wash over him like a cool breeze, rustling brush, feathering ocean, eyelids against the grains of sand. It’s the calm before the storm, he surmises, but he enjoys it regardless. 

He doesn’t try to speak, Jack that is. Just leads Ralph outside to the honking and bustle of a Saturday night city street - a herd of teenage girls in candy-colored Bermuda shorts carrying sweaty bottles of cola babble by them, give them the casual once-over and giggle shyly at their dress. They are surrounded by adults but Ralph maybe thinks he stills emits a stern aura of a teacher. He wants to follow them to the ends of the earth - hailing a taxi with practiced ease.

A shiny black cab marches up to the curb. Gruff cabby curls his lip at the dandies as they climb in and the one in face paint supplies an address. A lurch and they’re off, zooming through London, street lamps blinking through the windows diffuse into fizzy circles, golden bars track across their laps. Jack puts his hand on Ralph’s knee in a gesture he must think is reassuring. Ralph shifts him off, crossing his legs. Jack almost moves again, but the cabby glares at him from the mirror and he frozen until the vehicle screeches and the cabby berates a bicyclist with a blue helmet. 

Like a nervous boy on his first date, Jack all but falls over himself coming out of the cab to open the door for Ralph and ushers him up the front steps to his flat, fat tip in the cabby’s glovebox. 

His flat is shabbier than Ralph would have imagined. Sad sagging furniture and the overhead light is weak and orange. It smells faintly of rot, like a half-finished mold removal job. The door to the bedroom is opened, sheets strewn about, pillows on the floor. He idles by the front door as Jack bustles around the room, straightening cushions that immediately deflate once he leaves them. 

“I’m going to get you a drink,” Jack says. “You can take your jacket off if you want. Make yourself at home.” He starts into the kitchenette, the humidity of the flat already taking its toll as his orange hair sticks to the nape of his neck.

“I don’t want one.” 

Stiffening, pausing: “I’m going to get you a drink.” There is no firmness in his words, just a blind resolve. He’d get that drink if the flat was on fire. 

Ralph takes a seat on an armchair, on a cushion so devoid of padding he can feel the spring box digging into his rear. Clinking sings out from the kitchenette and the waterfall sloshing of a pour. Jack emerges - jacket discarded, sleeves at elbows - a wine glass full of whisky enclosed in his fist. The whisky stops spinning once it’s in Ralph’s hand. 

From his forehead drips of water slide down his temples, the stage paint scrubbed away and replaced with the harsh rubicund shade of a thorough washing.

They sit in silence. Jack twiddles his thumbs. Ralph regards his drink. A clock ticks a beat too fast, impatient for the next hour. He half-expects a cat to come roving from around a corner, nosing Jack’s hand for a niblet, leaping up on the sofa to curl on his bony lap, purr like a broken motor, ginger as his master. The place sure smells of cat, the gross domestication of beasts. There’s a mantleplace, scant photographs on it of graduations, a newspaper clipping Ralph can only assume lauds Jack for his role in some Gilbert and Sullivan schlockfest, a young man with dark Iberian features and cigarette on some beach with a shattered ruin behind him on a hill.

Mum, Mickey, and Parker are having a grand old time at some croissant stop, he presumes. Giggling through their butter-wet mouths, half-delirious with fading memories of the opera and sleep deprivation.

“Go on,” Jack says. Ralph looks up.

“Why?”

“Because I got it for you.”

“I didn’t want it.”

“So?”

“You drink it.”

“I can’t. You know I can’t. My voice-”

“Drink it.” He enjoys this. Reckless courage. “I’ll drink if you do.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Do it or I leave.”

“You won’t.” He sounds scared.

Eyebrow cocked and loaded. “Won’t I?” 

He rises from the chair, barely has his head in the air before Jack is off the sofa and slams him back down. The loose springs prick his ass. Blood might stain the chair, like when Agnes began to menstruate in the middle of Algebra and the rusty icicle shaped stain stayed tattooed on the wood until the school cobbled together enough money to paint over it. She was on the verge of tears every class until that happened, required tutoring after class. Nothing is spilled. 

Jack holds the drink now. Looks at it. Drinks, grimacing, about a third. The grimace is fake because the relief that washes over him is palpable. Shoulders drop, spine loosens. He probably hasn’t had a drink for a decade if he ever had one at all and just about licks the goblet clean. Ralph upholds his end of the bargain but is careful to put his mouth on the opposite side of the glass. 

“Are you happy?” The mask is back on. 

“Not really.”

“Can we talk now then. For real?”

Ralph blows out a heavy breath. “What about?”

“Anything.” Jack shrugs. Suddenly, he turns desperate, whining, the flick of a switch from boredom to bedraggled. Ralph retreats into the chair. “Everything.” He gazes longingly at the whisky. His face sags helplessly. “ _Fuck_ Ralph, we haven’t seen each other for--for years. I have no idea what’s happened to you since the island and I _want_ to. We--we’re tied together, don’t you get that? If we had never crashed, we’d be able to forget each other and live other lives, but we did and we _can’t_. We k-killed people.” He says so in a whisper as thin as a knife. “We can’t forget that. But we can at least not pretend it didn’t happen. Talk to me Ralph. It doesn’t have to be about the island, but I want to know what happened to you.”

“God!” He chokes out. “Don’t just sit there. Don’t act like I’m nothing to you because you're not nothing to me. We were friends once. Don’t-” he bends in half, his head between his knees like he’s trying to stave off nausea. When he comes back up there’s a pearl on his cheek. “Everybody leaves me. I told my parents what happened on the island and they carted me off to boarding school. I wrote to you, remember? I asked if I could visit. Me and Rodger used to meet up but he stopped showing up once he realized I didn’t want to talk about killing with him. Sam and Eric, they’re dilapidated. Sam pretends the war years didn’t happen and Eric just disappeared. I tried to find the other but they’re scattered to the four _fucking_ winds aren’t they?”

“I want-- _need_ to know if you’re okay or I’ll go mad. Wha… what has your life been? Are you okay?”

A curiosity in the ephemeral shape of flames dances precariously close to his heart, tempting as a poisoned lake in a poisoned forest. Ralph doesn’t dare to give an inch. But he burns. Jack, Jack, Jack, Whatever Happened to Baby Jack? too dolorous, too tall, not a little boy at all, still dressed in a choir boy’s black with the voice of a man; where did he get off on singing of love with the tattoos of Simon and Piggy’s deaths pressed into the sand and the rock of an island too unimportant to be given a name?; was he happy, Ralph really hopes he isn’t, knows so, but won’t say so.

Does he wear his black coat to funerals; does he think of death when he does? of Piggy, of Simon, of sand red with blood, red with the reflection of fire; when he fucks a woman and fears she’ll fall pregnant, does he think of the children he killed?; would he kill his own? Dry-throated anger held in check by fear, Ralph speaks through a gurgle.

“I told you in the bar. I went to Australia. I taught maths.” The bravery he felt - the invincibility - is wearing off. A crack appears, slim and delicate, across his words, an unmistakable vibrato.

“For twenty years? Exclusively? Why leave then?”

“To visit Mum. She gets lonely.” Jack falls back, one arm thrown over the sofa, exasperated. Ralph isn’t being interesting because he doesn’t want to be, but he knows being boring can be dangerous. If Jack gets bored, he might do something drastic, so he offers a taste, just one. He hesitates, a hesitation born of fear, not reconsideration, he does not consider the consequences of speaking, only the consequence of not speaking and to his mind, they are far more dire. He takes a breath, the foul scent of this morning’s breakfast, white pudding in a breakfast roll, dipped in the molasses of baked beans, taints his lungs. 

“That’s not true, actually,” he says and Jack’s ears prick. He nods his assent. “I quit and couldn’t stay in the country.” He remembers the flat dust plains, stuffing his coat under his head to sleep away the thinking, the mellow bus like the rocking of a cradle and they rise before his eyes. 

“Why’d you quit?” At any moment Jack could move to the arm of the chair and put his hand on Ralph’s back, comforting, a knife he lifted from the cutlery drawer to replace him when the iron was hot for the striking. The wine glass, he squeezes the goblet, is weak. He could smash it over Jack’s head and get the stem in the soft part of his neck before he even knew what was happening. It doesn’t have to come to that as long as he keeps him talking.

“No.”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s my turn to ask a question. If you get to know me, I get to know you.”

Jack stretches, his face screwing up, releases with a sigh. “Ask away.”

Ralph racks his brain, scours the flat for something of mystery. There is so much about Jack he doesn’t know and he knows he can’t be general or intensely inquisitive; he set up the rules, now he has to play the game.

“Who’s he then?” With his glass, Ralph gestures toward the mantle, at the man perpetually at summer. Jack tries to stand but thwacks his knee into the coffee table instead. Nursing his leg, he bites his lip and shakes his head warningly at Ralph. He isn’t threatened in the slightest because Jack isn’t trying to be threatening: he’s desperate, the possibility of pain that lies in the quadrilateral wood is worth suffering through any number of bumps and batterings. A bruise barely hidden under the red apple skin of his heart. Ralph puts his thumb over the bruise and pushes.

“He dead? That’s a shame, but you don’t really have a problem with dead things. Explains why you still keep his photo up. To gloat after the fact in case his ghost stuck around. Better be careful with ghosts, they’ve got nothing left to live for.” He forces a laugh to cover the sob of realization that washes through him. 

Jack manages to get up and limps over to the mantle, picking away a crust of dust in the crevices of the frame, replaces it just so, so the light catches it and the man comes to life in the sun, cigarette decreased to a stub. When he speaks he sounds tired.

“He was my flatmate.” 

“More.”

“What?” His head hangs heavily, but he tries to turn it anyway. 

“Tell me more. What was he like? Had to have a real sweet temper to live with you I bet.” 

“No, I get to ask a question now. Why did you quit?” Jack squares his shoulders and returns to his seat, posture stock straight like his about to trill out some aria. He lifts his chin, incredulous to a reply Ralph hasn’t yet given. He swallows thickly, looks away at the photo, wishing to be on that beach with the gulls cooing overhead. 

“Because I didn’t want to work there anymore. What was his name?” The man in the photograph has one eye closed against the sun and is on the verge of shutting the second one, the hint of a smile plays at the corners of his lips. He seems too… too something to have been Jack’s friend. Good, maybe? Like an upstanding citizen. Jack picks at his nails.

“Why do you want to know?” 

The lost bravery starts to creep back into Ralph, a byproduct of the whisky. “Answer my question, I’ll answer yours.”

A pause. “Jaime.”

“Tell me about him.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“I didn’t ask one. I didn’t break the rules. Tell me about him.” 

For some reason, Jack doesn’t need that much goading. He disappears into the bedroom for a minute and Ralph fears he’s said something wrong and he’ll be clobbered over the head by a poker or a cricket bat, so when Jack emerges with a photo album, Ralph thinks it an odd weapon. Jack pats the space next to him and Ralph goes without thought, though he doesn’t let their legs touch. 

Jack bites his lip. His eyes are full of a reluctant pleading. “You won’t tell anyone about this will you?” 

“Who would I tell?” Ralph asks genuinely, only realizing after he speaks that he said so out loud, blushes painfully red, and Jack, understanding in his own way, doesn’t press and opens the album, the only sound being the creak of the plastic pages. 

“Jaime was Irish, sort of. His parents were Portuguese refugees from the war.” A picture of a couple with a small boy outside a stony cottage, one of those abandoned famine homes, no smiles, dark eyes, dark circles under their eyes, thin bodies, is on the first page. The boy, Jaime presumably, was staring at the camera with a blithe curiosity, his shirt was oversized, ballooning over the waist of his trousers. The mother wore a braid down her shoulder that reached her bony hip, poking a bulge in her dress, she clutched the boy in front of her with a ferocious intensity like he might be stolen right out from under her if she loosened her grip for a second. The father just looks tired. Jack puts the album on Ralph’s lap, he averts his gaze from the photo and let him flip idly through the pages.

The family, remarkably, must have been able to afford a camera because there were a lot of candids: a blur of laundry in the wind, Jaime in a small, twilit kitchen covering the lens with a blistered hand, the father asleep in a lawn chair, newspaper headlines on his chest in Gaelic. A hodgepodge of history, a little dark-haired girl winked in and out of various snapshots, sometimes a baby, sometimes pigtailed with a pattern of voids in her mouth where teeth should be, and Jaime, aging and shrinking rapidly, was always avoiding the camera; there were school photos mixed in with black-and-white flowers colored in by crayon, violets in red and yellow and sky-blue; a recipe for stew; second-place ribbons. 

Narrating with a voice that vacillated between strained and enthusiastic, Jack would smoothly recount the events behind the photos as if they were his memories, scrunching up his nose like he could almost smell the sharp, clean scents of starch mingling with crushed yew berries. 

It was deep into the album by the time Jack made his entrance, a cultivated headshot, pomade-wet hair combed in rows, high collar, grim, but it seemed a necessary part of history to suffer through for whenever he appeared he was lively as a butterfly, eyes widened to popping, mouth twisted in all sorts of emotive configurations. The background too was lifted from its doldrums, no tidier but the mess came from the aftermath of a glorious party instead of the product of apathy; the sorrowful flat was a palace when the residents were happy as princes.

“We met nine years ago. I had put an advertisement for a flatmate in the paper and he was the first to answer.” He traced the border of a photo of the kitchenette, Jaime half-erased by sunlight, pouring a cup of tea. “I thought he was nice and had the right job to get rent in on time: he was a motorcycle mechanic.” Jaime kneeling by a motorbike, wrench, toolbox open. “It was this place, actually. We had very different schedules, so I thought we wouldn’t have to see much of each other: he had a conventional nine to five and I had my coming and goings with rehearsals and performances and parties and could sleep through most of the day.” Jack in a poorly composed art shot, five lit cigarettes in his mouth like the points of a star. “He ended up taking care of the house more than I did and, in my gratitude, we became friends. Very good friends. He bought us a cat for Christmas; we named him Ebenezer.” Said cat curled on an unidentifiable sleeping chest.

“Where was that one taken?” Again to the mantle. Clean, the glass sparkled at his eyes. He was unfairly handsome but not more so than Jack, but, then again, they were very different kinds of handsome.

“Greece. We moved to Italy for a spell when I toured there with _Iolanthe_ ; I was Strephon. We used to go down to Greece all the time.” More beach photos; Jack pink by the sun; Jack in a faerie costume; Jack with a cast of other people in faerie costumes.

Ralph nods slowly. “Then he died.”

“He isn’t dead, you idiot,” Jack snaps, strident as the flick of a bullwhip. Ralph’s heart picks up its pace, tripping over stones and pavement cracks. Then, composing himself, Jack says, “He went back to Ireland. His mother got sick. He’s taking care of her.”

“Then the cat’s dead.” The cat feels like a soft spot that, despite his fear, Ralph is eager to take advantage of.

“He’s in Ireland, too. Jaime’s mum likes cats and he was always more Jaime’s than mine anyway.” His gaze goes to a pillow in the corner, a cat-shaped depression lies on it. He sounds sadder about the prospect of the cat being dead than a person which disgusts Ralph. He only sounded mad about Jaime being dead.

“Are they coming back soon?” The album suddenly weighs strongly on him. If Jaime was to, at any minute, walk through the front door, Ralph didn’t how safe he would be with an ally of Jack’s in a room with him. The album could be a weapon should the need call for it. Jack gets up and stares at the beach photo. In order to appear unaffected by anything, Ralph flips farther to discover some clue, a clue to what, he wasn’t sure, but it was probably a good idea to hold as many cards as he could without Jack present. 

“My turn. Why did you quit?”

“Because I didn’t want to work there anymore. Are they coming back soon? The cat and Jaime?” 

“You’ve asked nearly ten questions and I’ve asked only five. I get five free questions now.”

“That’s not fair. We take turns. You can’t just ask a bunch in a row, that’s against the rules.”

“The rules are you ask a question then I ask a question and you have to answer it no matter what. You asked five about Jaime and I didn’t have the chance to ask mine. I won’t play anymore if you’re going to cheat.”

“Fine.”

“Why didn’t you want to work there anymore?”

“Because my colleagues didn’t like me.”

“Why didn’t they like you?” Ralph fidgets, closes the album, sets it next to himself, drums on the plastic cover.

“Because they thought I was a bad teacher.”

“Were you sad to go? And remember, you have to be completely honest,” he says when Ralph opens his mouth. Ralph shuts it again and weighs the benefits of lying to Jack. It’s not like he’ll ever see him after tonight.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I liked working there.”

“Wh-” Ralph cuts him off with a grunt.

“That’s question number five. It’s my turn now.” He lingers in Jack’s uncertainty, watching his eyes to see where they would fall but not looking in them; he stared at his shoes, nice shoes, black crusted with muck, easy enough to scrape off over the sink. The toe of one foot tries to knock some of the dirt off the other, missing constantly, in the throes of shaking.

“Don’t keep me in suspense.”

“I don’t want to play anymore. I don’t have a question.”

“Would you go back?”

“What?”

“If everybody forgot everything in Australia, would you go back?”

“We’re not playing anymore.”

“That doesn’t mean I can’t still ask though. I can still ask you things, you just don’t have to answer them. Tell me about Australia. I’ve never been.” Jack’s voice is soft, conversational. He comes to Ralph’s side. “It was hot, I bet. Hotter than the island?”

“About the same some days. The island was a wet heat and Australia was dry, like a fire, not a-’ He stops himself. A weird flower is unfolding in his stomach. They’d share so much together, so much history. No one Ralph had ever met before had gone through anything close to what had happened on the island. Who would Ralph tell about Jaime? Who would Jack tell about the girls? Jaime? Ralph doesn’t know Jaime and has no intention of ever meeting him so he doesn’t care about his opinion and he has no job for Jack to screw up and Mum already knows so why not?

Why not? Because Jack is not to be trusted, hissed inside his ear. He’s a bad person. He’s a killer but so are you. It burns up against the back of his throat like vomit. His head swims on a puddle of whiskey. He goes to drink but the glass is empty. Jack is gone then he is back and the whisky is back. He speaks by remembering. He swallows and speaks.

“As soon as I got my teaching certificate, I left the country. At first, I had no idea on where to go. I knew I didn’t want to stay on the British Isles, y’know, England, Scotland, Ireland, Shetland, Mann-”

“Why not?” Jack says, guiding, or else Ralph will start reeling off every town in Jersey. His hand hovers over the back of the sofa, ready to clutch him to his chest if he starts bawling.

“Because I didn’t want to be near you. I was afraid you’d break into my house and cut my throat” (he puts his hand in his lap, angles himself away; Ralph doesn’t stop for him) “and the United States seemed too close so I went to the end of the world. Since, I had so little training, real experience, so the school that would hire me had to be off the beaten path which, lucky for me, was the Francesca Academy. It was an all-girls, all levels school, six years olds through eighteen-year-olds in alternating dorms. I thought that would be trouble, but I had already blown all my allowance on the trip there and the contract did include room and board so I stayed, my plan being I’d scrounge together enough cash to look around Sydney when the holidays came along.”

Ralph remembered heaving his suitcase on the narrow bed and testing the springs, staring at the ceiling in a type of despair, sweat through his nice interview suit, he thought he might be pushed to kill himself in the isolation, though, despite the mildew and cracked paint, it was the first time since he was eleven that he felt safe and went to bed easily. The next day his first lesson went fine, and so did the second one, and the whole day, and then the whole week, and his confidence and affection for the academy grew until the day came he could barely fall asleep because he was so excited for the mock-graduation ceremony the staff was putting on for the fifth formers. The change had been so subtle he never really realized it until Mr Haliforth asked him how a ride in an aeroplane felt on the nerves. 

The students were a delight: eager, hardworking, bright with their big smiling eyes; the arriving class to Oxford couldn’t have pleased their professors more than those girls did when they flaunted a perfect grade to their peers. Kicking the air absently in snow white tennis shoes, gnawing on the end of a pencil, flicking hair elastics at each other, they were beautiful. They would enclose themselves in corners weeping into their skirts and he would comfort them.

“I was good to those girls. The school was. Most schools were bad to black girls, beat them and things like that but we didn’t. We were kind to them and gave them good schooling; they got good jobs when they graduated and would speak at the school. We could make them happy when they shouldn’t have been, without parents, alone. They didn’t have their parents most of the time and the littl’uns--little _ones_ , “ he corrects himself, “cried a lot in the first few days and weeks but they got over it soon enough, once they acclimated and knew we wouldn’t hurt them. _I_ never hurt them. I didn’t. I swear I didn’t.” Eyes wide, he pleads to Jack.

“Yes. Yes, I know you couldn’t have. You sound like you loved them very much.” Warmth surrounds Ralph, a plastic button on his earlobe like an earring, the smell of stale whisky fluttering his brown hair. His torso aches at the angle. Jack is in his ear. He is in Jack’s arms.

“It wasn’t their fault either. Mary’s. Not her...fault either.”

It was easier this way, his face buried in Jack, not having to look at him. 

He spoke about the girls, how his heart would falter and bleed for them whenever he saw a tear trembling from their eyelashes or a letter from home trembling in their hands. They cried, they put knives to their arms or their legs and left white and pink channels on their dark skin. He comforted them, hugged them, told them to be strong, keep going. He held them on his lap and hugged them. He invited them for tea in his room, helped them after school in his room. He felt a bit like a student himself, back at university, rooming on campus, everybody going into everybody’s room, stealing pens, copying essays, passing out from exhaustion in the wrong bed. His room was always quiet though, a refuge. They fell asleep on his bed and he put the blanket over them and made a pot of tea for when they woke up. Sometimes he fell asleep with them and on the periphery of his dreams wondered if his father had ever felt the swelling, suffocating, expanding heartache of being near a child. His child. His responsibility. It was only for a short while he did this with each girl. Most sprang up like tulips in May, going along with friends, Ralph waving at their wake. He wondered if his mother had felt the heartache he did when he had boarded the aeroplane off England.

Sometimes they didn’t get better. Alice, ten years old and had a gold star in Composition, came to his room once, did her Algebra assignment, didn’t speak, left and died two weeks later. There was a memorial service for her and Miss Novack cried into his shoulder, but Ralph was in shock. He still couldn’t remember that January; it was a black hole.

Perverts were a constant source of fear for the female teachers; it was almost a fetish in and of itself for them. Spot the Perv, they’d play at sports festivals with the staff from other schools, carefully monitoring the Chemistry man from Yanthrow Preparatory, Mr Ferrick of the tennis coaches who stood just a hair too close to a backside when demonstrating a swing, Brother Ellis of St. Agatha’s and his serpentine gaze to pass on their names to their feminine colleagues. Once the General Sciences teacher was caught sorting through the dirty knickers in the laundry, a tangled line of training bras coming out of his pockets. An amateur interrogation and investigation was undertaken by the French matron and mademoiselles, a bespectacled Holmes and her twin Watsons in pencil skirts. They got him to confess that no, he’d never touched a girl and no, he’d never done so at another school. Disbelieving every word he said (he had claimed the girls asked him to pick up their underwear for them), they relied on gossip and conjecture from the students, who, while having nothing good to say about him, had no complaints of an inappropriate nature and with no evidence of a crime besides minor theft, the administration was forced to let him quietly turn in his resignation.

When he heard the story, Ralph was horrified. They had spoken together at school functions, they had rooms on the same floor, they used to chat late into the night about films and Jayne Mansfield’s tits. He had been a normal, healthy man, and Ralph had never detected any whiff perversion during their time together. It made him sick that he hadn’t seen at once and got him to leave Francesca’s before he had the chance to unpack his bags.

So the teacher left in a fog of mystery and rumors swirled thick as snowflakes in Australia’s nonexistent blizzards, everyone having a different theory: he was an undercover agent from MI6; he had a secret lover in Bombay; he was discovered taxiderming the dean’s goldfish, the ones held kept on his office desk. It was only Mary who knew the truth.

Mary, or so she was called on her late-issued birth certificate, had come to the school as a sullen, temperamental eight year old, half-literate in English and despising sums, left to her own devices in the middle of the continent when her parents moved to New South Wales for work, leaving her and a pair of brothers with a decrepit aunt on a poorly managed and dust driven sheep farm. The boys were put to work shearing and herding, already too old for school and, as she was primarily useless for hard labor, she was sent for an education.

Having no friends, nor any desire to make any, she caught up quickly to the rest of her peers and bought what little attention she wanted by doing the assignments the others found confounding, but not without severe condescension and a smarmy grin. Her rapid academic improvement had given her an unfortunate arrogance; she sought to make it known to everyone within earshot of her near-perfect grade records, even to the upperclassmen, who she desperately admired, edging up near their tables at lunch and trying to impress them with her flippant disregard for assisting in plagiarism.

It was for that reason she came under Ralph’s scrutiny. Completing a test early, he recalls it had something to do with the volumes of cones and cylinders, she took out another student’s homework, assigned that morning, due tomorrow, and began to do it right in the middle of class, having promised the girl it’d be done before lights out.

Ralph reported the incident and they were disciplined accordingly, but he was oddly intrigued by Mary. He scheduled a meeting with her and she had spoken to him with such frankness and candor about her anxieties and her fears that he felt compelled to share some of his own. 

At first, he thought her honesty was a ploy to get him to feel bad for her, the ruse only broken by the mechanical way she rattled off lists of what her parents had fought about before they left, shaking the tiny house they lived in with their bickering. But he soon discovered she had been born without qualms entirely. Listening to her parents and brothers speak openly about each emotion they felt, whether positive or negative, in great belly laughs or the intense splitting of wood for nearly the first decade of her life had conditioned her to do the same, a touch less profane perhaps, but the lack of filter still remained.

It had been for this reason more than a sense of jealousy that their relationship had come out in such a messy fashion as it did.

He had treated her as he did the girls that needed comfort, found a kinship in her. Her desire to be looked up to, her desire to largely forego her past, had struck a chord in him and made him proud to call her a friend. 

In hindsight, his involvement with her to the extent it reached was poorly thought through, but he was so enamored with her he didn’t notice until it was too late how calculated and cunning she could be. It was a charming quality at first, she would analyze the teachers, deducing with startling accuracy their histories like some sort of pocket-sized Sherlock Holmes, giggling, embarrassed, mouth overflowing with vanilla ice cream, when he affirmed her estimations. Her wit was sharp for one her age - never cruel too, originally holier-than-thou, but that was quickly amended as her ego was dampened - and she could get Ralph to break out in great belly-laughs.

She was a great roller coaster of melancholia and euphoria. Her lax relationships with her peers only served to isolate her and despite the pleasures she found in simple things - a new flavor of jam, the pattern of a skirt stitching, a reluctant rainstorm - she could retreat into fits of jealousy when she caught wind of Ralph giving his attentions to another girl she thought didn’t deserve them as much as she did.

Most of the time, the girls grew out of their need for him, slipping out of his room at eleven or twelve, never to return, which he was fine with, but Mary had stayed his frequent visitor up to her sixteenth birthday. 

It was precarious, dangerous. She was growing into womanhood and coming to him with her concerns. As someone in close proximity with adolescent girls, Ralph had grown accustomed to the processes of female puberty but he still quailed from it. Usually, a girl would go to a trusted woman teacher or the school nurse with her questions or an upperclassman who had already fought her way through the trenches of brassieres and monthlies. 

In her burgeoning femininity, she had attached her affections to him. This was nothing out of the ordinary. Plenty of girls had developed crushes on him, left love letters in his mailbox, letters he threw out without reading. But Mary’s was different. She believed, rather sensibly, that they had a connection that, rather insensibly, could metamorphosize into romance. While it was true that their interactions had strange overtures of a marriage: sleeping in the same bed, her tendency to fetch him breakfast and fix his crooked ties, their playful digs at one another, the few familial ties he could muster himself to image were father and daughter or, at most, sibling of a large age disparity. Although he had tried to make his intentions as clearly as he could whilst still being subtle (he didn’t want to embarrass the dear child) she never seemed to acknowledge them.

She made a pass at him once - a hand on the knee, a kiss - which he had rebuked harshly, barking at her to leave. It was several weeks later when he had thought she had cooled off, that he was called to the Dean’s office. 

Mary confided in a chatty nurse all the thing she and Ralph had done together, lying in bed together with the door closed and the lights off, enough reluctant pauses to induce intrigue, enough faltering to imply something less than chaste had occurred. 

The same trio of sleuths had conducted a series of interviews with the girls in his class and found out his trists with them over tea. Though they never asserted anything sinister had happened, the administration had decided to be proactive, as they had been with the General Sciences teacher, and allowed him to leave quietly.

Ralph was irate. He exploded at the Dean, each expletive caused another rip in his heart as the man slunk lower in his seat. Ralph had always liked the Dean, he had taken a chance on the no-experience kid from England and treated the staff like a big group of cousins, lemon drops in a clay jar on his desk for the nervous to avert their attention to, round eyeglasses that slid to the tip of his nose. He had seen the man’s lip tremble, on the verge of firing him, and took the initiative to quit on the spot.

He saw Mary one last time before he left, all his Australian life squeezed into the two suitcases he had originally brought with him rattling on the linoleum floors as he dragged them to a waiting taxicab, she peeked out around a corner, expression vacillating somewhere between pride and regret. He called her Anmanari, her birth name, the name she had told him in confidence, and she ran away down the hall, her rubber-soled shoes echoing as they fell heavily across the linoleum. 

He spent the time before his flight in a pub, sucking down black ale pints until he was so drunk he couldn’t enter the aeroplane without falling down twice on the threadbare carpet ramp.

Mum wasn’t overjoyed when he turned up unannounced on her doorstep, but she wasn’t exactly going to have him march out into the night. It was several weeks into his visit, as they congenially termed it, before he told her why he left. 

For ages, her suspicion that something was wrong grew and grew into an entity in and of itself, sitting between them at dinner, its dark footprints on the carpeting. Ralph loafed around the house, reading and rereading his old childhood collection of Lang fairy books, buried under a mountain of duvets, collapsing into slumber with all the regularity of a narcoleptic. When he did leave the house, which was seldom, he did so with a clenched jaw and an arm firmly clamped on his mother. He hid in his room every time she had company over and watched the television through dull eyes. 

She had held him as he cried into her fleecy housecoat lapel, midnight like a fist around them. They hardly ever addressed it after that night and Ralph knew she never looked at him the same way, not with any sense of revulsion but with a pity that made his head hurt.

“I don’t blame her for anything. Really. It was my fault. I should have--shouldn’t have done...what I did with her. I don’t--I’m not _attracted_ to young girls,” he stutters. “I-I-I just thought we could be friends? She was--she reminded me of you now I think of it but nicer, sweeter. Maybe not like you at all then.” Jack’s grip around him tightens for a second. “Not that you’re _not_. It’s just she was a little girl and you’re, well, you’re you,” he says hurriedly. “And you’re very much different for a lot of reasons to Mary because--well--uh...for...a lot of reasons. Like--l-like...like…”

Then, as if a switch has been flipped inside him, Ralph starts to cry, right into Jack’s shirt.  
He’s so tired. He slept only three hours ago but more than anything he wants to enter a coma and stay there for a million years until no one remembers him and the exhaustion that overwhelms him on an almost daily basis will wash away like blood under a bathtub faucet.

He wants to go home.

He wants a stiff drink and to be comforted.

If by some miracle he was granted one wish, Ralph would ask to be left alone with someone understanding, he wouldn’t even have to know them, just the knowledge they wouldn’t judge him would be enough to get him through the rest of his life.

There’s no room to feel shame in Jack’s arms, though if he had more clarity of mind he would have surely torn out of the flat in embarrassment. The smell of the flat has all but faded now and all Ralph can smell is the metallic twinge of kitchen sink water and the wax of rouge on Jack’s neck. He gets a noseful as he heaves in trembling breaths. Jack rubs his back. It's the first movement from Jack that Ralph welcomes and because of that, he hates it.

He pushes away from Jack, laughing like it’s all a big joke. He wipes his eyes. The photo album returns to his lap, a shield.

“Let’s take another look at this, shall we? If I find anything embarrassing, I’m making copies.” This time, he’ll play the role of an old chum until he gets to go home. “Get me another bit of this, will you old man.” Disgruntled, Jack takes the wine glass into the kitchen as Ralph intently focuses on perusing through Jaime’s college-age years, though he doesn’t seem to have gone to college.

Shots of Jack and Jaime together are few and far between. One person inevitably holding the camera while the other poses. Even when they are together it’s obvious the whole thing is staged with a third friend behind the camera adding a whole new dynamic to the scene. It isn’t until he’s about halfway through the album that he sees them completely alone. They’re laid up in bed, propped up on pillows, Jack’s face mostly blocked by the camera (the picture being taken of their reflection in a mirror). Jaime has his head on Jack’s shoulder. Ralph can’t tell if they’re wearing clothes or not; they’re both shirtless but a blanket is covering their lower halves, except for their bare feet and calves that poke out from underneath the sheets. 

For a minute, he is absolutely stunned, taking in every minute detail like he is admiring the goddamn _Mona Lisa_ until he is able to shake himself free of impure assumptions and move on to the next page.

He wouldn’t have been surprised if Jack was queer, considering his occupation and his manner of dress and… Ralph swallowed hard, but if he had known he was, he surely wouldn’t let him take him to his flat and feed him alcohol and cry into his arms which is why he was sure Jack wasn’t, he wouldn’t have gone otherwise.

The next picture he sees is of a cock.

A rather large one too. Faded and blurry on a Polaroid print, he couldn’t have told whom it belonged to, even if he had been thinking in those terms, which, of course, he wasn’t.

It had to be a joke. An obscenity from school days.

Once in university, Ralph and the mates on his house floor had all dropped their trousers and photographed their collective genitals, a veritable bouquet of pricks, to send to a puritanical don, who had had the last laugh by tacking the picture up in his office for anyone to see.

But the picture of Jaime holding his own cock, smirking on the couch, is harder to rationalize. So is the jolt that rocks through Ralph once he had taken in the pose (one foot up on the coffee table) and the direction of his eyeline (directly out of the album).

Thankfully he was sat on the center cushion while Ralph was safely deposited on the right cushion.

With trembling hands and a sour constitution, Ralph flips through what remains of the pages to find a plethora of snapshots that can only be described as pornographic. Naked men, ten or twelve of them, milky white by the moon, streaming into a lake; Jaime laid out on his stomach in a mussed bed; Jack in an undone robe over a dripping bowl of cereal. 

The ones of Jack disturb him the most. He had seen Jack naked in school and on the island, bathing and changing, but in this context, this _sexual_ context, makes Ralph shiver. Then it makes him angry. 

Jack had picked out the album _knowing_ it had these obscene pictures in it as some sort of ploy. Is he trying to get Ralph into bed? wants to reenact their time on the island? The fireplace is barred shut so there is no hope of getting that part of the fantasy resurrected. Rape? is that a possibility he should be wary of? Even if it is, Ralph is far stronger than Jack and could fight him off.

He sticks his thumb on the page to keep his place but returns to the upright pictures of an idyll Irish childhood. Jack reenters with a glass for himself and sits himself down on the center cushion and Ralph wonders if he remembers Jaime sitting there in the nude and if sits there on purpose.

“Where was this taken?” Ralph asks innocently, his finger tapping the plastic in a lazy rhythm. Under his finger Jaime and the little girl perch on a slipshod wall of large rectangular stones. 

“Uh, I don’t know.” Jack leans in closer to get a better look. He breath falls over Ralph’s hand like a sheet of mist. “That’s Melita though. His sister. I’ve met her a couple of times. She’s really nice.” And off he goes, recapping his encounters with Melita and her brother around London as the siblings teased each other in elementary Portuguese (“Jaime had been teaching me phrases here and there but I really could not understand a single word they said.”) and small-town Irish girl Melita marveled at the reconstruction efforts of Buckingham Palace through the gilt castle gates (“She murmured this bit of jazz of Yeats when she saw it and we left to get ice cream and she was still there when we came back, chatting with the workers.”). His whole face lights up and he might go on forever if Ralph doesn’t steer him towards another memory, this time of him and Jaime breaking dishes in a little Italian bistro on the outskirts of Rome after they forgot to bring enough money for the check and had to wash dishes to work off their debt and kept making each other laugh to the point of dropping plates with nonsense impressions of the Italian waiters: the picture of them in pure white chef hats. Ralphs laughs despite himself.

And now he is comfortable - they’re a couple of pals catching up - Ralph turns to the cock. “When did you take this one?” He asks innocently. 

Their eyes meet - Ralph sees pure alabaster - and Jack starts to sweat.

Ralph enjoys making Jack sweat as he tries to muster an explanation as to why there is a picture of a cock in his photo album. He enjoys that Jack is scared. 

“T-that one? I don’t… It’s probably Jaime?” He sounds unsure.

“What? You don’t remember taking a photograph of your own cock?” Ralph keeps his face placid and neutral, an inquiry into the colour of the sky - ‘blue, huh, very interesting indeed. Wonder why God chose such a silly colour like blue’.

“Jaime put the album together. He must have put it in as a joke.” The cheeks that went pale now ruddy so he looks like a statue someone put a bit of rouge on. He runs his hands through his hair nervously and chuckles nervously. “To be honest I never looked farther than the ones with Melita in them. She’s really tops, don’t you think? Nice tits and all that?” The questions come out choked like he can’t bear to talk about her like that. He crosses his legs then uncrosses them.

“I hadn’t noticed,” Ralph says, which is the truth.

“No, I’m serious. None of the pictures would capture it right but she’s got a real pair on her. There’s one of her on her knees when she dropped all her pence on the pavement.” Jack tries to take a page over but Ralph moves it just out of reach. Jaw clenched, he rises from the sofa and down the whisky a safe distance at the mantle. “Real fabulous tits.”

“I haven’t seen that one. Seen this one though.” With surgical precision, Ralph slides the picture of Jaime holding his cock out and holds it up for Jack to get a good look at. Jack laughs when he sees it, a false choked sound like a fish dying on a dock.

“Oh, yeah. I remember that. I took that so he could give it to a girl he fancied. She sent it right back and he put it in as a reminder to not pursue such prudes again.”

Ralph replaces the picture, nodding like he understands. He follows Jack to the mantle. He sees his eyes twitch in the reflection of the glass. A deep red triumph runs in Ralph’s veins. He’s the winner. He has Jack pinned with a few delicate words. It’ll take only a well-directed breeze to topple his glossy house of cards.

“I kissed her once y’know.” Still making excuses, fearful. Ralph obliges him. A grin is threatening to bloom between his lips.

“Oh?”

“It was the best night of my life.” 

“Really? You’re not lying to me are you?” 

The urge to whisper the tips of his fingers across the diaphanous hairs on the nape of Jack’s neck is strong and one he gives into. Goosepimples spring up like poison toadstools after a rainstorm. Everything is silent. The rain is gone and the air outside is putrid with humidity.

“No.”

“You sound like you’re lying.”

“I’m not. It was the best night of my life. Melita kissed me that night.”

“Was it the best night of your life because she kissed you?”

“No.”

“Why was it then?”

“Because Jaime took me into the bedroom and fucked me for the first time.”

And there it is.

It’s horrible and it’s clarity. 

The evidence was clear. The two of them in bed, the naked photographs, only a fool would try to excuse them as something other than a romance. Jack hadn’t looked twice at Parker but hadn’t he stared hungrily at Mickey? Hadn’t he? 

Jack’s queer and the thought makes Ralph sick to his stomach and light in his head. The fear holds him to ground, stops him from falling backwards. And he has to keep up the facade. He does take his hand off Jack’s neck, doesn’t want him to misconstrue the gesture as attraction, but if he’s patient it might return, tighter next time.

“Where’s Jaime now?” 

In the glass reflection, Jack’s lip twists and his chin shakes.

“I told you, he went back to Ireland to take care of his Mum. He won’t be back until she gets better. I don’t know if she is or not.” 

“Will he be back soon?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“He left three years ago. He only wrote me two letters. He left with the cat. Even the cat left me.” He says this almost with a laugh.

Despite himself, Ralph feels pity. No. Not pity. Empathy. What he felt when Anmanari told him about waving goodbye to her father for the last time. 

“You miss him.”

“Naturally.” Jack tears himself from the Italy picture and falls into the sofa’s embrace, stretched out in the catlike manner of greedy, searching comfort. His eyes shut. “Sit with me.” 

Ralph, unable to explain, obeys. He sits on the arm of the armchair. Jack never specified where.

Burrowing himself deeper into the cracks of the sofa cushions like a red squirrel in the snow-soft grass, Jack hums skillfully, even at the angle he lies, even with he career wrecked by one glass of whisky. The song isn’t operatic, at least not in its scale, but Ralph doesn’t recognize it as something he heard through the fuzz of Mum’s tinny radio. She loves the pop hits. 

Through the little swatch of song does Ralph really get his talent.

Because Jack is giving him understanding, Ralph gives him the truth.

“It’s wrong.”

“What is,” he mumbles.

“You and Jaime. Two...men. That’s not right.”

He opens his eyes then narrows them. He chuckles and closes them to talk. “You’re one to talk.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Heat rises from his stomach to his collar. His scalp starts to itch. He thinks of the bedroom door Jack shut and if he concentrates hard enough he thinks he can hear muffled grunts and the endeared laughter of sex in love. The man on the sofa keeps quiet so he repeats himself. “Hey, what’s that supposed… What are you talking about?”

With a fake yawn, Jack rights himself, stretching. “You know what it means. Are you gonna finish this?” He’s pointing at the whisky then, without permission, drinks it anyway. 

“No, tell me.”

Exhaling largely from his nose, like a dragon, harsh and vengeful, Jack says, “It’s just a little hypocritical don’t you think. When we were on the island, we...well...y’know...wanked each other off occasionally. Feels like that’s enough to put you somewhere in the arena of understanding.”

“We didn’t _fuck_ ,” Ralph says, quick to excuse, “We were children for God’s sake.”

“I know that.”

“I’m not like you. I’ve had girlfriends. I’ve slept with women.”

“So have I.”

Ralph’s face heats. “Are you implying something?”

“No! God, no. Jesus Christ!” Jack shoves off from the couch and Ralph’s stomach jolts with excitement but he just marched behind the sofa, addressing his closed bedroom door, hand tearing through his hair. “You’re so bloody _sensitive_ all the time. I can’t say a damn thing around you without worrying if you’ll explode over it!” 

“Explode? Well, pardon me for being rightly disgusted over your - your _aberrant_ behavior!” 

Jack turns around, flames from his eyes; flames are his hair.

“Because the aberrant one isn’t the man sleeping with six-year-old girls!”

From the bottom of his eyes, Ralph can see his chest inflate to popping the fall to the level of an emaciated child. He can’t do anything but breathe. If he lets himself to anything else that anything else would be to slam Jack’s head against the floor over and over again until it spills open like a pomegranate. From the front of his eyes, he sees that same ripe face buckle and stutter. He hears his heartbeat reminding him he’s still alive. 

Snakelike, Jack slithers to the armchair and sits even though Ralph doesn’t want him to but Ralph can’t speak. He pulls Ralph off the arm and into his lap. When Ralph struggles apart, he sees the dewdrop stains on Jack’s shirt, new ones and falls back into his chest like he belongs there. Words that feel like apologizes shape the hair at the crown of his head. He was breathing so clearly a minute ago. Or was that an hour? Has he been breathing since he met Jack again? His chest aches and so do his lungs like he was holding his breath in anticipation. There’s a knocking on his cheek. Wet on his forehead. His ears start to clear.

“-’m sorry Ralph. Please. I’m so sorry. I was… Please, Ralph. I’m sorry,” comes out from the swirling sea of quiet and breathing. But it is like a breath and he plunges underneath again.

Oh Ralph

Oh Ralph

Oh Ralph

Jack’s skinnier than his big black coat left on. The dials of his spine are round and smooth. 

His grip on Jack gets fragiler and fragiler as his shakes.

They switch.

Why is this nostalgic? The shouting and the hatred and the forgiveness-needing.

Jack isn’t supposed to be human. He’s a savage. A wild animal. A black scab that should have healed over years ago but is gushing hot over cool skin instead.

He’s being eaten.

There’s a mouth on his neck then there’s a mouth on his lips and he’s responding with his mouth and there’s a tongue in that mouth then a tongue in his mouth and they would have resorted to cannibalism eventually on the island so late is better than never. 

With two pairs of tangled legs they stumble off the armchair and into the bedroom because one of them opened the door and onto the bed where Jack had the best night of his life. Where Jaime fucked him for the first time and many others.

Jack plays the catamite by night and the romantic lead in the evening.

Jack thinks Ralph is a queer and that he is afraid to admit that and Ralph is okay with that because kissing shuts Jack up from saying vile implications about the Francesca girls. 

They are both hard by the time their shirts are off. Ralph is still tan under his and on top of the white sheets pale, pale Jack is dark. His soft hair bleeds on the pillowcase. 

From a side drawer, he produces a lilac-coloured bottle and shucks off his trousers and knickers. His belt - Italian-made - the buckle chimes like an altar boy has knocked over the sacring bell at Mass. It's obscene in its obliqueness.

The fluid that comes from the bottle nub is thick and clear. 

“Do you want to,” Jack whispers by Ralph’s ear before he bites it. Ralph attacks Jack’s mouth, forces him to lay supine on the bed where he licks his clavicle. He doesn’t like teeth on his body. He doesn’t like to be chewed. 

He bites Jack though.

He feels his cock on his hip bone. Hard and large.

They are both out of breath when he answers.

“Not that part.”

“Okay.” Softly. Softer. “Okay.”

Jack retrieves the bottle from where it fell on the floor. More fluid. Ralph rests on his haunches while he does then turns because he can’t look and takes off his shoes and his trousers and his knickers as slowly as he can. 

Jack’s eyes are closed when he looks back. Mouth open, legs spread. He still wears socks, black and wool. His finger disappeared up his arse and he’s sighing through moans.

“You’re disgusting,” Ralph says plainly.

“I know, I know,” Jack breathes, imagining Jaime. He fits another finger in his arse. 

“I don’t know why I’m still here.”

“Don’t leave. Don’t leave.” Jack tries to sit up, but Ralph just pushes him down. He lies down on his side next to Jack so he has to strain to look at him and swallows hard. Ralph gets hard watching his Adam’s apple duck and jump on his swanlike throat. He traces the shadows of it, entices it to dance for him. Their eyes meet and something subtle like understanding passes between them.

“Why I would stay here with such a slut when I could be out with a pretty girl?” His voice comes out collected instead of cruel, and Jack responds easily.

“Because you don’t want a girl. You want to fuck me. Please fuck me.” His hips rise and direct themselves towards Ralph, but he puts a flat palm on the dale from the crest of his hip. Fingertips brush through red hair near the base of his cock. He curls up his hand and pushes down, massaging with his knuckles in a petite oval.

The morning’s warmth off the sheet on his cock arouses him. Invidiousness, emerald and mossy, dampens his armpits. A whole bed cannot be this warm without someone to share it with. Never Jaime, not for a triennial. But somebody Jack found sexy enough in low lighting lay here and had his arsehole mold to their droopy cocks. Ralph trips his knuckles over a bone, hopes it aches, hoped it ached.

“Fuck you? Where so many other men have? How many since Jaime left? How many before? You tart.” He noses up Jack’s neck to murmur directly to his ear. “I bet you get a prick before every show. Comes with a backstage pass. I don’t know how you last without one.” 

A wine-dark curl falls over Jack’s eye, and Ralph tucks it away behind his ear. For safe-keeping. Jack barely notices. Maybe he does because now he can see Ralph from the corner of his pleading eyes. Ralph wishes he had that camera right about now. Jack looks exquisite.

He tries rolling over to Ralph; his lips search. Ralph pushes him flat. He sits up, peels off his socks, kisses his instep. He has lovely feet, but, then again, he isn’t a dancer.

“Do it, please. Please Ralph, please,” he begs. He yips; he barks. He’s like a bitch in heat.

“Turn over.”

Obligingly, he does, shoving his pretty arse in the air, moaning into the pillow. Ralph puts his prick in him.

It’s like finding the cauldron of gold at the end of a rainbow. Catching a will o'wisp, sweat spattered through a nebulous bog. Wishing of a sprig of myrtle.

After years.

Of waiting. (of solitude?)

He topples over onto Jack who grips at him, at his waist, twisting his wrist awkwardly, but Ralph just pries him off and thrusts. Jack trills with pleasure.

Gorgeous really, hot and tight and powerful because Jack can’t hold back the noises he wants to make, and they pour out his mouth like jewels out of Biancabella’s hair. He fucks into him hard. He can’t stop himself from enjoying this, from peppering Jack’s shoulders with kisses, from pulling up his fringe and running his hand up and down his face as Jack licks his palm and the underside of his fingers.

Ralph grapples with Jack’s prick, stroking slow and unevenly with the pace he set inside him and Jack nudges back against him. Ralph knows both his mind and his body are getting a deliberate fuck.

He moves his hand lower and fondles Jack’s bollocks which he loves. He goes lower and farther back and accidentally brushes a fingertip against the root of his own prick and goes through, for a split second, an out-of-body experience where he really comprehends he’s inside _Jack bleeding Merridew_ and how incredibly much he likes it and how incredibly hot he finds Jack’s gasping for his cock like greedy whore.

Teeth gritted, he huffs out of his nose in hot puffs of air until he can’t hold back anymore and sighs loudly and woefully. The sigh cracks, stuttering. For the third time this evening, the umpteenth time today, Ralph looses tears down his cheeks. 

He’s so disappointed in himself.

He brings a fist down on Jack’s spine. Again and again. Beats him savagely.

Revenge. What’s the justified version of revenge? Justice. Just Us. Together entwined. Mummy and Daddy and their stillbirth on the sand. A house built on sand cannot stand. Bruises blink into existence like stars in the crepuscule. Thumbnail punctures skins like a spear. Poppies bloom. 

Jack falls decumbent on the sheets but can’t stop himself moaning. He must feel the rain on his vertebraes. The drops curve away from his gaunt bones. Clear and red. He shudders.

“Ralph,” he begs. “Wait, please. Don’t. Stop, please. Ralph.”

Ralph can hear him perfectly clear this time, and it rends his heart to draw blood. He’s not an artist. He’s a teacher. He’s supposed to nurture. Kind of then he stops. Isn’t sure what to do. He hasn’t had a plan for ages. 

“Ralph. Hey, Ralph. Get out.” There isn’t malice in his words. Ralph pulls his prick from out of Jack and kneels dejected on the bed as he turns over, still stupidly hard. His big pale moon face peers up at him blankly. Almost blankly, his red eyebrows are knit together in a facsimile of concern.

“I’ll go. I’m sorry,” says Ralph, throat constricted so it comes out strangled. He moves to gather his scattered suit but is prevented by a cool palm on his arm. At this point, Jack’s chest is a second home to his heavy head. One of his nipples rests erect under his cheek.

“I thought I told you I didn’t want you to leave,” Jack says to his temple, a tender breeze. Ralph nods, his lips pressed in an invisible line. 

Being more experienced, Jack leads him inside him once again and once he’s inside they kiss desperately. 

They make love in the direction a bride and bridegroom would on their honeymoon evenings. Like honey through a sieve, slow and languid and without a hint of bitterness.

Jack finishes first with a sweet-sounding hum. He lets Ralph finish inside him. 

Ralph dresses while Jack cleans himself out in the bathroom. The buttons are too small for his hands and don’t quite fit in their holes the way they’re supposed to. He tried friendliness, confrontation, superiority, escape, love, cruelty, gentleness, and Jack is still able to stand.

When he finally comes out of the bathroom, Ralph is halfway out the bedroom. He doesn’t try to stop him but Ralph feels compelled to stay regardless. He leans against the doorframe as Jack situates himself in bed, covering his lap with sheets demurely.

“Y’know,” he says, scrambling through the same dresser for a cigarette, “I was debating with myself after the show if I should actually speak with you.” They both watch Jack’s knees shift underneath the cotton instead of each other.

“Oh really,” and he can taste the smoke and the click of the lighter before it sounds.

“I thought I might just give you a nice free opera and let you alone. But I was selfish. I wanted one last look at you and when I saw you with that other fellow…” he blows out smoke instead of a name.

“Mickey,” supplies Ralph.

“Yes, Mickey. I got jealous.” Jack shrugs.

“Those shouldn’t be good for your voice.”

“Jaime was always saying that. He would make me these nasty herbal teas that were supposed to repair whatever vocal cords I ruined with cigarettes, but I haven’t had a good smoke for ages.”

“What about your career?”

“I like Gilbert and Sullivan better than that Handel stuff anyway.”

Ralph takes the cigarette from Jack, though he doesn’t remember walking up to him, grinding it to ash on the dresser top. Next thing he knows Jack has his wrist lightly.

“Stay?”

“Mum will be worried.”

“Oh.” He bites his lip like a dejected child. Only he’s not a child.

“But if you ever get into another Gilbert and Sullivan, I’d love to hear you sing again.”


End file.
